Tag Archives: indirect land use change

California issued a staff report last week for its “Proposed Regulation to Implement the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.” As expected, the rule proposes a measure of indirect land use change emissions for select biofuels – corn and sugarcane ethanol and soy biodiesel. The report defines the assumptions behind the analysis – in a word, that use of existing crops for biofuels reduces supplies, increases prices, and thereby induces agricultural expansion: Land use change effects occur Read More >

A new study from MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change examines what it calls the Unintended Environmental Consequences of a Global Biofuels Program. Unintended consequences seems to be the watchword of the year. The authors posit that there will be a feedback loop from climate change and policies that promote biofuels to address it. Climate change itself will affect the productivity of land, shifting agricultural production to new areas, and Read More >

A team of researchers led by Jason Hill and David Tilman at the University of Minnesota have published an interesting assessment of the health costs of both greenhouse gas and fine particulate matter from corn ethanol, gasoline and cellulosic ethanol. The study is available in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences early release for Feb. 10. The conclusion is favorable to cellulosic ethanol: The benefits of shifting from gasoline and the current generation Read More >

The European Parliament on Dec. 17 adopted amendments to the Renewable Energy Sources Directive, raising targets for production of biofuels but at the same time setting strict sustainability standards to monitor and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the use of road transport fuels. The Parliament’s adopted text makes clear that it intends to calculate climate change emissions from international land use, but that the science is not currently available to do so: Whereas (11) In Read More >

One of the most strikingly circular arguments put forward to support inclusion of current estimates of indirect land use change emissions in both California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard and the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard Life Cycle Assessment is that these estimates are so large. The University of California Berkeley Letter to EPA from Michael O’Hare et al. and the previous letter to California’s Air Resources Board by the same group (Mark Delucchi et al.) are Read More >